Motivated by the business practice whereby some manufacturers open their own retail stores despite the existence of more efficient independent retailers, this paper examines the distribution channel choice of competing manufacturers under demand uncertainty and resale price maintenance. We...

Platelets are short-life blood components used in hospital blood transfusion centers. Excluding time for transportation, testing, and arrangement, clinically transfusable platelets have a mere three-day life span. This paper analyzes a periodic review inventory system for such a perishable...

Early order commitment (EOC) is a strategy for supply chain coordination, wherein the retailer commits to purchasing from a manufacturer a fixed order quantity a few periods in advance of the regular delivery lead time. In this paper, we formulate and analyze the EOC strategy for a...

In the supply-chain literature, an increasing body of work studies how suppliers can use incentive schemes such as quantity discounts to influence buyers' ordering behaviour, thus reducing the supplier's (and the total supply chain's) costs. Various functional forms for such incentive schemes...

Supply chains often consist of several tiers, with different numbers of firms competing at each tier. A major determinant of the structure of supply chains is the cost structure associated with the underlying manufacturing process. In this paper, we examine the impact of fixed and variable costs...

We study the global diffusion of ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 certification using a network diffusion framework. We start by investigating the presence and nature of contagion effects by defining alternative cross-country networks and testing their relative strength. Second, we study how the rate of...

There are many materials for which the quantity needed by a firm is at best indirectly related to the quantity of final product produced by that firm, such as solvents in manufacturing processes or office supplies. For any such "indirect" materials, an inescapable incentive conflict exists: The...

The ISO 9000 series of quality management systems standards, introduced in 1986, has been adopted at over 560,000 locations worldwide. Anecdotal evidence suggests that firms can achieve internal benefits such as quality or productivity improvements or that certification can help firms maintain...

This paper is inspired by the recurring mismatch between demand and supply in the U.S. influenza vaccine market. Economic theory predicts that an oligopolistic market with unregulated but costly entry will experience excess entry and oversupply, not the undersupply observed in the market for...